University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V
THE NAPO

I WAS surprised, to say the least of it, to see a great, big, raw-boned, typical prospector from the West standing at the edge of the raised floor on which I was doing my cooking. Barefoot, dressed only in a cotton undershirt and a pair of home-made pants of the same material, he stood surveying me calmly. There didn't seem to be any nonsense about those clear gray eyes, and that tough square jaw. The man was evidently one accustomed to a hard life in the open. He looked a rough and ready type, perhaps a Texas Ranger. (He told me afterwards that, as a matter of fact, the Rangers were the cause of his exile.) A bald spot surmounted his rugged face, and a rough grey beard, which looked as if it had been recently trimmed up with a machete, covered his chin. He wasn't very broadly built, but at the same time he gave the impression of having a great reserve of strength. He looked a man of forty-five.

Then I remembered the Governor of Archidona's words, which had never recurred to me till that moment.

"You must be Don Juan," I said.

"That's me," came the answer. "That's all the Spanish I know, but I guess that's what they call me. My name's really Jack Rouse."

"Well, come in and have something to eat, Mr. Rouse."

"Cut out the titles," my guest put in.

"Dinner's just about ready," I went on, "the grub isn't much, but it's the best I can do."

Rouse took one look at the steaming pots of rice and beans, the open can of corned beef.

"Are you apologizing for stuff like this?" he said; "I've had nothing to eat for two months but bananas."

Even as he spoke I could see his eyes bulging in anticipation.

"Well come on, get busy"; I cried; and with that we squatted on the floor and set to work. If ever a man enjoyed a meal, it was Jack Rouse that night. The poor devil was ravenous. I could see in a moment that he was up against it badly. Half-way through the meal he paused for want of breath, and told me something of his story.

He had run away from home when he was fourteen, and had never seen his people since. Most of his family, he had heard, had since been killed by the Sioux Indians, and he, when he was out in the West hunting buffalo, "had never passed up a chance of collecting a Sioux-venir himself." He had drifted from the West to the Klondike before the big gold-rush, where he had worked as blacksmith and cook in the Ground Hog Mine. He cleared out too soon, however, but a year or two before the great discovery was made. Back to Nevada he went, and worked as messenger and driver on a stage-line. Finally he tired of risking his life for the poor pay he was getting, and got in the Company's bad books under suspicion of having turned over the mail-pouches to a pair of road-agents without putting up enough of a fight.

"Uncle Sam is looking for me," he ended up curtly.

For my part, I didn't care a hang who was looking for him. Here was a man of the right stamp for a trip through the country that lay ahead. Within half an hour of meeting him he had agreed to accompany me down-river and share with me what luck might bring. He

didn't much mind where he went as long as he went somewhere. He had seen quite enough of Archidona to last him for a long time, and as for bananas, he didn't care if he never saw another in his life.

We turned in that night on the floor of the shelter, each one of us pleased with the prospect of the journey we were to commence together on the morrow. My bearers slept at the other end of Napo, a dozen feet away. One thing struck me forcibly, and that was that the Indians swathed themselves from head to foot in the cotton blankets which each man carried as well as his food. I said something to Jack about "this bunch of mummies we've got with us," and he growled out a caustic remark on their "seeming to be afraid of the night air." And we left it at that.

We lay talking for some time, when suddenly I noticed that every now and then something would fly in at one end of the shelter, cross over our bodies, and disappear into the night at the other end. At times, as the night wore on, these spectres would pass over us so low that we could feel the air from their wings on our faces. "Owls" we decided, for they were the only things we knew of that fly so silently by night.

At last we fell off to sleep, and I did not wake up till dawn. When we got up, the first thing I noticed was a feeling of dizziness and lassitude which took me by surprise, for I had slept soundly enough. I turned to Jack to see how he felt, when I was dumbfounded to see a great ugly clot of blood hanging from the back of his head. Immediately I thought of the Indians, who were already up and about, busy with the fire. Jack confessed to feeling weak also, but as for wounds he had none. I spent the best part of a quarter of an hour searching in vain for any sign of a cut big enough

to let flow so much blood. Then I noticed a dull red patch at the foot of my own blanket, but my feet seemed to be unstained. At last I called the Indians' attention to the state of affairs, at a loss for an explanation. And then it was that I saw that one of them had left a similar pool on the floor where he had slept. The porters laughed as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and said that "the night-birds had been feeding." They immediately pointed out to us our own wounds, which we had failed to find. Jack had been tapped on the forehead, and I on the big toe.

And that was my first experience of the Vampire Bat.

The only district between Iquitos and the Andes where I have seen the real blood-sucking Vampire Bat is the zone through which the River Napo flows. It haunts its banks and the country on either side for a few miles, but, I think, never goes far inland. It is distinct from the Javelin Bat which is almost entirely frugiverous, and from the Great Vampire which measures some twenty-eight inches across and is quite inoffensive.

In general it resembles an ordinary bat, except that it is somewhat larger. Its spread of wings measures between ten and twelve inches. It may have been fruit-eating at some time, but, if so, like the New Zealand parrot which destroys sheep, it has turned from fruit to a stronger diet. Be that as it may, it now lives on blood sucked from live animals and men. It would appear that this is the sole form of sustenance of this particular species, although in the case of the Javelin Bat the mixture of fruit and blood as a diet is suspected, thus marking an intermediary stage in the process of transition. There are at the same time a number of other varieties of the Bat family which are commonly known as "Vampires," probably from their diabolical appearance, but which are erroneously named, inasmuch as the name

popularly means blood-suckers; as a matter of fact they are either frugiverous or insectivorous.

The blood-sucking Vampire Bat is equipped with two pairs of very sharp eye-teeth. The wounds which it makes are perfectly cylindrical, about an eighth of an inch in diameter, and a sixteenth of an inch deep, made in the form of a cone, as if by a counter-sink for a screwhead. Where the flesh is covered with a thick skin, as on the feet, the hole is much larger, to allow this sixteenth of an inch puncture to be made in the flesh itself. It appears that this is necessary, for the proper flow of blood to be obtained. These perfectly circular wounds are probably made by the incisor teeth, which have sharp cutting edges. Furthermore, the Vampire Bats are never known to wake the sleeper whom they attack, nor do they ever attack a man who feigns sleep. I have tried to catch them at work too often. Indeed they will not even commence operations on one of a party of men while any one of them is awake. To carry out their purpose, they must hover over their victim without alighting, absolutely noiseless and immobile. A body of such weight, if it alighted, would surely wake the most unsuspecting victim.

Again it is self-evident that a wound of the depth to which they go could not be made without waking the patient, unless some form of local anaesthetic were applied. Therefore, I am forced to the conclusion that these beasts secrete an anaesthetic by means of a gland in their mouths or throats, which they inject into the wound as soon as the skin is broken. The wound also appears to be aseptic, and if care is taken it heals almost at once without leaving a mark. The effects from loss of blood last, however, for several days.

The method which the Vampire follows when feeding is not to retain the full amount of blood which it sucks

from its victim, but rather to pass the main bulk of it straight through its intestine (it has no other stomachic organs), having assimilated that portion of it which has for it a nutritious value. This I have proved many a time from the position in which I have always found the pool which has been left after an attack on my person. I must have been attacked at least twenty-five times in all, and every time I observed that the blood lay about four inches (rather more than the length of the bat's body) away from the spot from which it was drawn. No blood ever clings round the actual wound itself. Yet another proof, to my mind, of the theory given above was furnished by a case which came to my notice a few days down the Napo—at the mouth of the Suno. The owner of a trading-post lost in one night eighteen chickens which he had protected from the Vampires by wire netting. In the morning he found not only the dead birds, but the single marauder, which was folded up like an accordion, hanging from the roof of the coop, peacefully sleeping. How could so small an animal possibly retain the blood of so many fowls? Furthermore, my remark as to the probability that these bats do not alight while feeding is borne out by the fact that the wounds on these chickens were all in one place, the top of the comb. What chicken would allow anything to settle either on the nape of its neck or on its face and calmly go to work to bore a hole in its head?

Again, as bats have no legs, their wings being all one with their limbs, where would that Vampire have fixed its only means of support, namely the hand-like claws in the main rims of its wings, in order to be in a position to operate on its prey?

As may be imagined, these animals proved a great source of trouble on the Napo. Several members of the

Indian crews which Jack and I engaged at different times were nearly put out of commission by two or three punctures during the same night. We tried to protect ourselves and our Indians by means of toldas (awnings—Spanish) of cotton fabric, erected like mosquito bars, but we found that whenever any part of our anatomies touched the covering, the Vampires would make a hole as big as their heads through the cotton, and proceed to attack us as usual. They nearly always make for the extremities of the body, particularly the feet, forehead, nose, hands, and elbows. At other times we tried sleeping out on the sand-bars, in the hope that they would not leave the woods. At such times, we tried to avoid the necessity of sleeping under any kind of cover, as far as our heads were concerned, for the pleasure of sleeping under the stars. However, we covered our hands and feet, hoping to escape the pests should they find us. It was a vain hope, for they always performed their mysterious operations on our faces. In a word, there was no escaping them.

A great deal has been written about Vampire Bats, real and imaginary, which is misleading, if not exaggerated. For example, it is commonly stated that these animals have destroyed whole herds of cattle which have been imported into various parts of Oriental Ecuador. This may be true, but only indirectly. The obvious conclusion which one draws from such a statement is that the cattle died from loss of blood. This is not the case. They died from screw-worms, deposited by blow-flies in the wounds left by the bats, against which the cattle could not protect themselves.

The blood-sucking Vampire, contrary to its practice in the case of men, attacks animals while they are awake. I have seen them on the backs of both horses and cows

at night, hovering over their withers evidently to the great distress of the poor beasts. The bats seem to know that the superior intelligence of a man is a source of danger. The fearless tenacity which they display in the one case is as marked as their cautiousness in the other. Indeed in some parts of the Napo Valley there is a smaller species of blood-sucking bat which preys on cattle, but has never been known to attack a man. The Vampire Bat is for me the most repulsive of the innumerable pests of the Amazon country, a thing which has sent a shudder down my back many a time.

After discovering the cause of our weakness, we fell to talking of our start down-stream. The question of food occurred to us, and Jack's mention of the splendid bananas on which he had been living (not that they were splendid to him), made me anxious to take a supply. So he promised to pack out a bunch, together with his few belongings—his gold-pan, a pair of shoes, and a machete. He said that he would call in at Edwards' old shack too, and pick up a few more machetes which he could find among the debris of the fire. So he went off, and left me to pack up and wait for the canoe.

He was back in a few hours, by which time our two Yumbos had come floating in from Archidona in the new craft.

The canoemen were short and slightly built, no match for the Indians of Papallacta. Their hair was cropped, and they wore nothing but a pair of cotton trunks dyed purple. I didn't know as much about Indians at that time as I did a year or two after or I might have detected what may be called "The Good-Bye Look" in their crafty eyes. As it was, I set out on that trail in all innocence.

We all heaved my stores into the dugout, a well-made (but as it turned out, badly designed) cedar one, some

thirty feet in length, with more beam than is usual in such a craft, namely about thirty inches. Jack's kit didn't occupy much space. It was stored in a couple of patch pockets sown on his drawers. Edwards' old machetes turned out to be worthless, having lost their temper in the fire.

By two o'clock we were off. I was in high spirits, for my dream was coming true. Jack, too, was jubilant to be leaving that "goldless, grubless spot." All went swimmingly that day. The rough canoeing was a novelty to us, and every fresh bend in the river was something to which we looked forward eagerly. It rained, but not incessantly, as it does farther down the Napo during the winter months. The progress that we made was good, helped onward by the swift current. The Napo is at that point extremely difficult to ascend for the same reason, and because of its broken, rocky bed. It is, however, a gigantic river, as measured by European standards, and the conditions ruling at one end of it cannot be taken as a criterion of those at the other. Its total length is some eight hundred and fifty miles, of which six hundred are navigable, i.e., from the junction with the Aguarico, which comes down from Colombia, and forms the boundary between Ecuador and that country along its lower reaches, to its discharge in the Marañon. To be more accurate, it is navigable for river steamers with a four-foot draft even at low water over this distance. I mention these data as they give one an impression of the Amazon basin as a whole.

After about three hours' paddling, we camped on a rock-strewn shore, where Jack showed signs of his early training as cook. He fell to on my stores with more than ordinary interest, while I watched the Indians building a palm-thatch shelter, an operation which was of great interest to me, as it was the first time I had

ever seen it done. (Of the making of these shelters, which are in general use throughout the whole of the Amazon basin, I shall speak later.) I was still to learn to how many uses the omnipresent palm-leaves of those forests can be put.

I was already beginning to find out that Jack, with his varied experience of outdoor life, was not only a good companion, but a first-rate woodsman. That was the beginning of a friendship which lasted through the many joys and troubles of four years in the forests. Had we but known that we were destined to pass so many days and nights with no company but each other, we should probably not have talked so much that night before we finally fell asleep swearing that we would slaughter the first Vampire that dared approach.

We awoke next morning to find ourselves alone, and tapped. Little by little, during our passage down the Napo, the hopelessness of trying to out-manoeuvre the vampires was borne in on us throughout a succession of nights during which we were attacked with fiendish regularity. Jack appeared to be the favourite, perhaps because he had not smoked for years. I shall not again refer to the regular blood-letting from which we suffered at that time, for no one case was different from any other. Suffice it to say that we never succeeded in even seeing a bat at work, much less catching one. It was not till later that we had the pleasure, unique for us, of killing one of these cunning night visitors.

Being as yet unacquainted with the tricks of the Indians, we thought that our canoemen must have gone off early to look for game. Slowly it dawned on us, after a fruitless search, that we were really alone, and would have to paddle our own canoe, an art of which we were by no means masters at that time. The Yumbos, of

course, had deserted, having received their pay before we started, and added to it a few little items of my kit which took their fancy, in order to avoid the long trek back from the Suno River to Archidona.

But the Indians were not the only wily customers in the old Amazon rubber trade, as we soon found out.

Left to our own devices, we entered upon a period of devil-may-care, go-as-you-please existence. We stopped to swim when the spirit moved us. Our arrival off a particularly enticing sand-bar would be the signal for a halt for food, whatever the hour; in the evening we beached our canoe purposely early so as to have plenty of time to try our hand at the new game of house building; we shot at everything we saw which might or might not be good to eat. We had time and powder to burn. Nobody was waiting for us on the pier at New York. There was nobody to say us yea or nay. We were having a splendid time.

After three or four days we reached the mouth of the Suno, a tributary of the Napo on its left bank, where we found the Colombian trader Mejías, of whom we had been told in Archidona. He had passed through the local capital some time before, on one of his semi-annual trading trips, bringing down merchandise from Quito, and returning laden with rubber and gold. He had a house of sorts at the point where the two rivers meet, where he kept an Indian or two to look after the product of his trading at such times as he had any. His plan of campaign was to pay visits to Indian settlements in the vicinity, and advance trade-goods against rubber, collecting the latter on his next visit. He also had a persuasive personality, which served him in good stead when he encountered a canoe-load of Indians laden with somebody else's rubber, for which they had already been

paid by the rightful owner. He was a good Indian who could brush aside his tempting offers and get safely past.

Our meeting with Mejías played no small part in the shaping of our fortunes. From the first moment of our intercourse we got on well together. He provided us with a great deal of useful information concerning the ways of the Indians and how to handle them, the ins and outs of the rubber business, and the geography of the country. He certainly knew a great deal about the Upper Napo. We decided as a result of our conversation to go in for the rubber trade. For that we needed such things as "trade guns," powder and shot, percussion caps, and more machetes and axes. I accordingly traded with the Colombian my imitation jewellery and cotton cloth (which the Yumbo Indians call chamalote) which I had brought all the way from Quito for bartering, in exchange for which he fitted us out with the kind of goods I have mentioned above, which were more appropriate for paying Indians to act as caucheros (rubber-collectors—Spanish) and canoemen. The usual procedure was to pay with such goods in advance, the Indians engaging themselves to serve for six months and repay you for the goods in arrobas of rubber according to the recognized scale of exchange. The arroba is a Spanish weight originally, to which no fixed standard can be assigned. Even in different parts of Spain itself it varies. In Brazil it is equivalent to thirty-two English pounds, in Ecuador and Peru to twenty-five. But the Indians have no scales, and accordingly for them the arroba was a thing of bulk and not of weight. They were simply shown a sample ball of rubber, weighing anything up to a hundred pounds, and told that that was an arroba. A trade-gun was held to be worth three arrobas in the case of a single-barrelled gun, and six

in the case of a double. Machetes, axes, and so forth, were valued in proportion.

"Trade-gun" was the name given to a muzzle-loading weapon—if it can be so called—which was specially manufactured, probably in Germany, for the Amazon rubber trade, where many thousands were sold. They were so constructed that they would be worthless after forty or fifty shots at the most, compelling their owners to start working again for the possession of a new one. (Once in possession of a high-grade gun, no Indian would have ever worked rubber again.) Their barrels were made of wire wound on a bar, the latter turned to a slightly conical shape, so that it could be withdrawn after the winding was finished. They were then heated and dipped in solder, smoothed off and painted blue or grey. The lock was simple in the extreme, manufactured with the same attention to detail as the barrels. Not more than a thimbleful of powder was put in as a charge. When fired, three distinct noises were emitted, the interval between them varying in strict accordance with the degree of dampness of the powder. First the snap of the cap, which as a general rule functioned promptly; next, a more or less prolonged fizzing, as the powder gathered strength; lastly, a snort like a wild pig as the charge left the muzzle, on the occasions on which it did. As often as not, the charge fizzed itself to death through the touch hole. As it was a matter of speculation as to just when the charge would leave the muzzle, the quarry had to be carefully followed round the horizon in the case of a wing shot, or covered as it ran, the hunter running also, in the case of ground game. The guns were deadly at forty feet. Toward the end of their life, or if too big a charge were used, the barrel would unwind in the most ludicrous fashion. Those weapons might even be used, as are the bolas in

the Argentine, for entangling the feet of the quarry. Of my personal experiences with trade-guns I shall speak later.

As we were talking with Mejías of going in for rubber, he happened to mention the existence of an unexplored river, the Yasuní, which flows into the Napo just above the Aguarico from the south. Its banks were, he said, reputed to be inhabited by two unknown tribes of savages, infieles, the Spanish-speaking South Americans call them. No one had ever ventured up the Yasuní. Not even the caucheros who knew the Napo well had ever been able to persuade their Indians to accompany them into the gloomy forests which lined its banks. Little though Mejías suspected it, he was unfolding before us a venture which appealed above all others to both of us; to Jack, a born prospector, it opened up visions of gold-working descendants of the Incas in possession of the hidden treasures of the Ancients; in me it awakened the old longing to explore where no white man had ever trodden before.

So we postponed our journey to New York in favour of the Yasuní, little thinking how long we should be buried alive, or what my family and friends would say when we failed to put in an appearance. We told Mejías of our decision, and arranged to leave our canoe and stores at his post while we went up the trail to Loreto on foot to find Indians for our expedition. Loreto is a village two or three days' march up the Suno from its mouth. It is, like Archidona, a centre of exchange, where the trader displays his wares to the Indians who come in from the surrounding chacras , and labour is given in exchange for trade goods. It is a mere collection of palm houses, like Archidona.

So we availed ourselves of his offer to keep our things for us until we returned, and hit the trail for Loreto,

with two porter-guides lent us by the Colombian. Three days of marching through the inevitable mud brought us to our destination. On arrival we took possession of one of the empty huts (the whole "town" was common property) and approached the inhabitants on the subject of the canoemen we had come to engage. We were told to go to the local Indian chief, who lived on a chacra half a day's march away. We found him the next day. He and his wife were grey-headed, intelligent old people, living with their two brawny sons in a typical Yumbo house, built of palm-wood uprights and walls with a heavily thatched roof. It was furnished with bamboo beds, a stone fireplace, and earthenware pots, with a sprinkling of iron utensils imported by traders. They had a well-kept chacra, in which they reared the ever-present bananas and yuca (the Spanish name for cassava or arrowroot), the two main staple articles of food of all the people on the Upper Amazon basin and its tributaries. They also kept fowls, and followed the curious practice of cutting the roosters' vocal cords to avoid being located by strangers. It was a comical sight to see them going through all the motions of crowing without uttering a sound.

The old man took an intelligent interest in the welfare of his people, enquiring most carefully as to our intentions, the pay we would give, and the date of our return. We made him a present of a trade-gun, assuring him that it was absolutely yanga mahta (gratis) if he would aid us in securing five experienced rubber-workers to go with us "down the Napo." We dared not mention the Yasuní by name, for that would have meant the end of all things. He fulfilled his contract. The men were found. My knowledge of the Quichua tongue, picked up in Occidental Ecuador, stood me in good stead. Without it we should have been in a poor way, for Jack spoke

not a word of it. The men picked were a fine-looking lot, little more than youths, led by one whose name was Santiago.

But we were faced with a disappointment. We had to sit down in Loreto for three solid weeks while the Indians prepared their marching kit. It came as a great surprise to us that they should take so long about it. We had imagined that they would be ready within twenty-four hours of agreeing to go. Here it was, then, that we made our first acquaintance with masata, as the Yumbos call the arrowroot pulp preserved with human saliva which they drink with every meal. Their women prepare it for them by masticating cooked yuca root, and packing it in palm-leaf-lined baskets. It is a long process, identical with the making of the giamanchi of the Antipas of which I shall speak at greater length later on.

We too were forced to subsist on masata to a certain extent. Many a day we sat about waiting for our breakfast to be chewed for us. Jack, I remember, took exception to the masata prepared by an old hag who had but a few teeth left and did the work with her gums and her tongue.

I will pass quickly over that period of boredom, relieved only by the necessity of constantly urging our Indians, whom we had paid already a trade-gun apiece, to greater speed in their preparations. Finally they were ready, equipped only with their guns (which still retained their barrels intact) and about a hundred and fifty pounds of masata apiece. The total lack of game round Loreto had certainly deprived us of many a square meal, but perhaps the balance was in our favour, as our rubber-workers had, by the same token, been unable to fire their guns. The latter might, by then, have reached the unwinding stage. In order to save time and transport

our heavy stores of masata as easily as possible, we boarded a canoe, and arrived back at Mejías' post in a short day. I passed the day in explaining to the Indians that I had a fine assortment of trade goods awaiting us at the mouth of the Suno.

We stepped ashore, and entered the Colombian's house.

It was empty.